Performance

Finding out why a site is slow and fixing the cause, including the parts that live on the server rather than in the page.

Site speed is measurable, which makes it one of the few areas where the work can be proved rather than asserted. It also affects both rankings and conversion, so it is rarely wasted effort.

Most speed advice stops at the page — compress images, minify CSS. That is real, but plenty of slow sites are slow for reasons that live on the server: no compression, cache headers that prevent caching, a database query that got worse as the data grew.

What you get

  • A diagnosis of what is actually slow, measured, with the numbers shown
  • Core Web Vitals — LCP, CLS and INP — assessed against real-user field data as well as a lab test
  • Images converted to AVIF and WebP, sized correctly, with dimensions set so nothing shifts as the page loads
  • Compression and cache headers configured correctly at the server
  • Render-blocking resources removed or deferred
  • Before-and-after measurements, not adjectives

How the work is done

Measure before changing anything

A performance improvement with no before-and-after number is a guess. The first deliverable is always a measurement, including the awkward one that says a particular fix is not worth doing.

Use field data, not just a lab score

A lab score describes one run on one simulated device. Field data describes what your actual visitors experienced on their actual phones, which is what search engines use and what customers feel.

Fix causes, not symptoms

A caching layer in front of a slow query hides the problem until traffic grows. Worth doing sometimes — but knowingly, not as a substitute for the diagnosis.

Layout stability is not optional

A page that finishes fast but moves under the reader's thumb feels broken and is measured as such. Reserving space for images and late content is usually the cheapest large win available.

What this does not cover

On a site built from a heavy theme and a large plugin stack there is a floor below which tuning cannot go without changing the platform. That floor gets identified early, so the choice between "faster" and "much faster, but rebuilt" is yours to make with real numbers.

Questions

Our PageSpeed score is fine but the site feels slow. Which is right?

Probably both. A lab score is one run on a simulated device; what your visitors experience is field data, and the two often disagree. The field data is the one that matters.

Does site speed really affect rankings?

It is one input among many, and it is not the largest. It affects conversion more directly than it affects ranking, which is usually the better reason to fix it.

Can you speed up a site you did not build?

Yes — most performance work is on existing sites. What is achievable depends on how the site is built, which is why the assessment comes before any commitment.

Related

Technical SEO

The engineering half of search: making a site crawlable, indexable, fast, and unambiguous about what each page is.

Custom Website Development

Websites built as code rather than assembled from a page builder — so they stay fast, stay indexable, and can still be changed in five years.

Have a system that needs building or fixing?

Describe the problem and you will get a direct answer about whether it is worth doing, roughly what it involves, and what it would take.

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